David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

drive,” he said. “Nobody taught me that. I learned it. It was kind of like trial and error. I liked the juice of it. I got some self-esteem from it. I felt more control over my life.”
    He was sitting in his home office as he said that—a room easily the size of most people’s houses—and then he finally came to the point. He had children that he loved very dearly. Like any parent, he wanted to provide for them, to give them more than he had. But he had created a giant contradiction, and he knew it. He was successful because he had learned the long and hard way about the value of money and the meaning of work and the joy and fulfillment that come from making your own way in the world. But because of his success, it would be difficult for his children to learn those same lessons. Children of multimillionaires in Hollywood do not rake the leaves of their neighbors in Beverly Hills. Their fathers do not wave the electricity bill angrily at them if they leave the lights on. They do not sit in a basketball arena behind a pillar and wonder what it would be like to sit courtside. They live courtside.
    “My own instinct is that it’s much harder than anybody believes to bring up kids in a wealthy environment,” he said. “People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they’re ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth. It’s difficult at both ends of the spectrum. There’s some place in the middle which probably works best of all.”
    There are few things that inspire less sympathy than a multimillionaire crying the blues for his children, of course. The man from Hollywood’s children will never live in anything but the finest of houses and sit anywhere but in first class. But he wasn’t talking about material comforts. He was a man who had made a great name for himself. One of his brothers had taken over the family scrap-metal business and prospered. Another of his brothers had become a doctor and built a thriving medical practice. His father had produced three sons who were fulfilled and motivated and who had accomplished something for themselves in the world. And his point was that it was going to be harder for him, as a man with hundreds of millions of dollars, to be as successful in raising his children as his father had been back in a mixed neighborhood of Minneapolis.

4.
    The man from Hollywood is not the first person to have had this revelation. It is something, I think, that most of us understand intuitively. There is an important principle that guides our thinking about the relationship between parenting and money—and that principle is that more is not always better.
    It is hard to be a good parent if you have too little money. That much is obvious. Poverty is exhausting and stressful. If you have to work two jobs to make ends meet, it’s hard to have the energy in the evening to read to your children before they go to bed. If you are a working single parent, trying to pay your rent and feed and clothe your family and manage a long and difficult commute to a physically demanding job, it is hard to provide your children with the kind of consistent love and attention and discipline that makes for a healthy home.
    But no one would ever say that it is always true that the more money you have, the better parent you can be. If you were asked to draw a graph about the relationship between parenting and money, you wouldn’t draw this:

    Money makes parenting easier until a certain point—when it stops making much of a difference. What is that point? The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. After that, what economists call “diminishing marginal returns” sets in. If your family makes seventy-five thousand and your neighbor makes a hundred thousand, that extra twenty-five thousand a year means that your neighbor can drive a nicer car and go out to eat slightly more often. But it doesn’t make your neighbor happier than you, or better equipped to do the thousands of small and large things that make for being a good parent. A better version of the parenting-income graph looks like this:

    But that curve tells only part of the story, doesn’t it? Because when the income of parents gets high enough, then parenting starts to be harder again. For most of us, the values of the world we grew up in are not